Assessing Program Culture in Virtual Fellowship Interviews: Insights From Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellows

Background: Virtual interviewing for fellowship training programs has been widely adopted since the COVID-19 pandemic. However, whether fellowship candidates can adequately evaluate training program culture through virtual interviews is unclear.

Objective: Our aim was to explore how pulmonary and critical care fellows ascertained program culture during virtual and in-person fellowship program recruitment interviews, with the overall goal of improving our virtual recruiting interview processes.

Methods: Exploratory semi-structured one-on-one interviews (study-interviews) following a constructivist approach were done during the fall of 2022 with a convenience sample of current fellows within the pulmonary critical care medicine fellowship program in an urban tertiary care hospital. Questions probed fellows' perspectives on program culture, what features of program culture they valued, and how they evaluated program culture during their initial fellowship interviews (recruitment-interviews). Study-interviews were framed to explore four deductive themes, and transcripts were analyzed with inductive thematic analysis.

Results: Of the 11 fellows interviewed, two had completed in-person and nine had completed virtual recruitment-interviews. There was an overall favorable perception of program culture during all recruitment-interviews, regardless of format. Elements of program culture that fellows valued included training program quality, an academic focus, complexity in cases, workplace diversity, a positive socioemotional environment, and a collaborative/supportive working/learning environment.

Conclusions: This study suggests that important elements of program culture can be evaluated by fellowship candidates through virtual interviews when applicants are allowed ample opportunity for high-quality interactions with faculty and current trainees.